This collection of essays by 12 members of the MIT staff, provides an inside report on the scope and expectations of current research in one of the world's major AI centers. The chapters on artificial intelligence, expert systems, vision, robotics, and natural language provide both a broad overview of current areas of activity and an assessment of the field at a time of great public interest and rapid technological progress.Contents: Artificial Intelligence (Patrick H. Winston and Karen Prendergast). KnowledgeBased Systems (Randall Davis). Expert-System Tools and Techniques (Peter Szolovits). Medical Diagnosis: Evolution of Systems Building Expertise (Ramesh S. Patil). Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering (Charles Rich and Richard C. Waters). Intelligent Natural Language Processing (Robert C. Berwick). Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (Victor W. Zue). Robot Programming and Artificial Intelligence (Tomas Lozano-Perez). Robot Hands and Tactile Sensing (John M. Hollerbach). Intelligent Vision (Michael Brady). Making Robots See (W. Eric L. Grimson). Autonomous Mobile Robots (Rodney A. Brooks).W. Eric L. Grimson, author of From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System (MIT Press 1981), and Ramesh S. Patil are both Assistant Professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. AI in the 1980s and Beyond is included in the Artificial Intelligence Series, edited by Patrick H. Winston and Michael Brady.